Broward Health’s Latest Machinations: Unpaid Bills And Missing E-Mails

Eight months after Broward Health’s top executive committed suicide, the public health system is still unable to put the past behind.

The seven Broward Health commissioners are appointed to govern the billion dollar-plus public health agency. Yet flotsam and jetsam left from the administration of former Broward Health chief executive officer Dr. Nabil El Sanadi, who shot himself to death in January, continues to dominate Broward Health Commission business.

This month commissioners continued the fallout from El Sanadi’s death:

• Commissioners stiffed a law firm out of a $200,000 legal bill. The firm was hired to represent commissioners during an investigation by Gov. Rick Scott’s Inspector General sparked by El Sanadi’s death.
• Broward Health’s staff refused to turn over e-mails involving El Sanadi to Scott’s state investigators.

The El Sanadi e-mails were missing from reams of documents that Broward Health has turned over to the Inspector General.

In addition to the e-mails involving El Sanadi, the state also wants to look at e-mails of Broward County Commissioner Chip LaMarca and those of former commission board chairman David Di Pietro. LaMarca was a vice president at Zimmerman Advertising when the firm received a no-bid $71.4 million contract from the commission led by Di Pietro, a close friend of LaMarca.